Horror flicks? No thanks!

"T he Beast that Ate Chicago," "Mutant Spiders," "Godzilla Eats Japan," "The Bride of Frankenstein," "The Thing from Another World." Horror flicks...

My mother loved to watch old horror movies on TV. Considered almost comical now, those black-and-white thrillers scared the living daylights out of the movie attendees of the 1930s and 1940s who often sat through a double feature of such terror. As a young girl, I can remember sitting in my living room with my family watching Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in the original "Frankenstein." And my mother could mimic "Count Dracula" better than anyone, complete with the accent, while hovering over us with a cape, "I vawnt to dringk your bludd!" She'd have us children screaming as we raced down the hall to hide our heads under our pillows.

Horror flicks have never been my forte but I was often left no choice with only one TV and Mom usually in charge of the channel selections. She'd seen many of the same movies as a teen and had no trouble realizing that what she was seeing was just acting and special effects. I knew it wasn't real but my mind seemed to feed off those horrible movies and my imagination went into hyper-drive after I went to bed.

You'd think my parents would have realized that maybe they shouldn't watch Godzilla devour New York while I was in the room but many cold Saturday afternoons were spent as a family watching Godzilla, Dracula, Frankenstein and other masters of horror. Then, Mom and Dad spent half the night getting me back to sleep before the next monster assaulted my dreams.

Advertisement

Maybe the worst science fiction horror movie I ever saw was, "The Beginning of the End" which was about a scientist who had treated wheat seeds with radiation to increase production. Locusts invaded the silo and ate the wheat then said locusts were soon the size of Greyhound buses with voracious appetites. The special effects were lousy and the movie was panned as one of the worst science fiction debacles ever. Fine and dandy -- but every grasshopper I saw after that had my over-active mind churning those horrible insects into the size of a city bus that would devour my house -- with me in it!

When my mother finally realized that she simply could not watch horror shows with me was in the fall of 1961. Mom liked to watch some hour-long TV show that came on every Monday night. Normally a mystery, there was sometimes a horror theme especially in late October. That particular night, when I was just 11, the movie was about a man who'd been a famous piano player. For some reason he was murdered then his hands were cut from his body before he was buried.

The hands somehow came alive and dug themselves out of the grave then crawled, almost crab-like, across sidewalks and streets to the home of the murderer, also a pianist. As the hands crawled stealthily up the stairwell and into the apartment of the murderer, the hair on my neck and arms stood straight up. When the hands began strangling the pianist while discordant piano music played, I bolted from the room to go hide under my bed covers.

My father was not home all that week but Mom ended up sharing her bed with a very frightened young girl as I processed the horror of that show. I will never know if Dad issued an edict or if Mom made the decision but neither science fiction nor horror shows were watched in my presence until I left home.